Weaving the Century

One hundred years of tapestry from the Dovecot weavers

It’s 100 years since the Dovecot Studios was established in its first home in Corstorphine, and this exciting tapestry exhibition over three floors of its current premises in Infirmary Street is a fitting celebration of how this very traditional art form has developed and adapted as an innovative medium in contemporary art.

Nowhere is this clearer than in ‘After, After, After Monarch of the Glen’ – Peter Saville after Sir Peter Blake after Edwin Landseer – the final in a series of appropriations and reinterpretations of Landseer’s original painting; a woven tapestry bringing the evolution of the work full circle, and the modern, seemingly digitalised image offering a contemporary take on the hunt as depicted in traditional tapestry wall hangings.

Elsewhere, a vast collection of more than 60 works illustrate the history of the studio – for example an Alfred Priest tapestry of Mount Stuart revealing the studio’s early connections with its founder, the Marquess of Bute – while exciting collaborations with artists including Eduardo Paolozzi, Elizabeth Blackadder, David Hockney and John Bellany demonstrate the broad language of tapestry, its versatility, as well as its potential and relevance to contemporary art practice.